3. I have experienced atheism as a rather unwelcome
visitation that was not foisted on me by atheists, who had never attempted to
rid me of belief in God, though I had known atheists. An atheist would have
failed at it, had one of them tried. Then the idea of choice would have been
inherent. The atheism I underwent I did not choose. It was foisted on me by my
exclusion in a spiritually-oriented group I belonged to. It mounted to my feeling
not welcome—unprecedented for me—to participate in community prayer and
possibly in public worship in any form. My exclusion was very unpleasant while
it lasted. I felt forced to wear a helmet of stone. The imaginary helmet weighed
like stone and covered that part of my forehead known in Hinduism as my god’s
eye. I referred to my ordeal as “involuntary atheism,” and once, my brother
expected me to try to describe it. Privately-educated Catholics ignored my
having a brother. Syncretic Catholic Linda criticized my trip to see him in California
in 2009. I incorrectly thought why. My life and inheritance remain unopposed to
theirs. I attributed my discontinued belief to cult damage. I lived as a
spiritual exile over more than seven, perhaps ten years. I took refuge in rereading
the poetry of two American masters. One, a member Transcendentalist, seemed during
my black-out maturity heartbreakingly expired in spirit, though in poetry she
has no better. I read there God in His jealousy had withdrawn her worship. Later,
I felt restored to my belief pattern of "agnostic.” My restoration did not
greet me as a “miracle.” I just felt like myself again. I survived killers’
predictions. One of the would-be killers compares to Job’s Wife in the Bible,
as Frank Kermode describes Her line in an essay. Instead of dying—as programmers
obedient to Cynthia Macdonald and Catholic Sandy tried to order it, contrary to our
link to what may be a common God—I became restored to beliefs that were mine before
I met them, aimless, silly programmers. I remembered my sense, without its initial
joy, that travel is the wandering Voltaire inscribed. Joy is not a belief, all-y’all father-fuck'ng, no-account no-writes.

Monday, September 08, 2014

I feel tired of throwing that issue of Time across the room. RAPE: The Crisis in Higher Education by Eliza Gray. I have planned since first rejecting Gray's understanding of a system to write a critique of her sense of playtime as she records it in Time. The roundup of opinions called The Debate: How should college campuses handle sexual assault? is worth reading and is fair. Gray's feature article is a religious editorial that I feel required by Foucault to critique.

Gray defends the city of Missoula, the campus of the University of Montana, and its young men on campus, except six per cent of them as determined by social screening of their attitudes on campuses elsewhere. Gray's real call-out is of campus victims who equal 20% of campus women.

I believe Gray's target victims were softened prior to college attendance, in high school, or before high school. Their armors against War were not smelted by college, and indemnity ensued. She faults women's heavy drinking for the surge in campus crime. She faults a devil who appears on one of his shoulders, who encourages him—is he of the six per cent of intent sex abusers on campus or of the majority who are good at heart?—to have sex with a girl who has passed out. An angel suddenly appears on the man's other shoulder that persuades him to let the drunk girl sleep uninterrupted, perhaps to snore or even to drool a little.

In real life, rape occurs to the sober. Rape is the exchanging of a first name on the first rape night out. Rape is a consequence of color. Rape is off-campus. Rape is slightly daft, slightly smart. It is a campus amenity.

These days, penetration that is unwelcome, however slight, defines it.

Repeat victims are most aware of it. Victims are liberals and were trained early against racism. They duck reporting grievances on campus or off campus in their fear that to report crime is racist, even though they may realize that not to report crime is illegal. Reliable statistics, as staggering in number as they are, including statistics about falsely-reported crime, are on David Duke's website. Eliza Gray's perpetrators are good guys who heeded the devil on their shoulder that single night when the strange, snoring, passed-out, drooling drunk girl spread herself haphazardly lengthwise and became a willing corpse to their or the rare bad guy's one-time necrophiliac sensibilities. That night leads, unfortunately, without exception, to her extinction and curtails her furtherance in life. That is as Eliza Gray would have it in her optimism for college as a wonderful, sexy head start in life. The wicked silence in the victims had better come forward and leak, pronounce itself in time for closing date Time, lest the other eighty per cent of campus women should have to admit to knowing them. Victims, according to Gray, are not activists but are uncooperative girls earmarked for sacrifice who live in dishonest hiding.

Friday, August 29, 2014

Saturday, August 02, 2014

Praise to Civil Liberties News, publication of the
American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota. I am scheduled to volunteer at the
ACLU-MN booth at the Minnesota State Fair this year and am looking forward to
it. Nevertheless, I feel out of the loop re: Hobby Lobby, a craft store chain.
I read in an interfaith newsletter that Hobby Lobby had fired a woman worker
who had requested unpaid leave when she was four months pregnant. That case was
described by the interfaith newsletter as Hobby Lobby's religious hypocrisy. In
general, I have had the question: Are employers required to pay for the birth
of newborns? Birth is much more expensive than any form of birth control. In my
days as a low-paid employee, $5/hour when minimum was about $3.50 and
$18K/year, one job offer I received in the publishing industry in New York, two
single-owner business employers informed me that their insurance premiums were
$2K per year higher if they employed fertile women than premiums they paid for
men. I wish the debated subject could focus on condoms, in frankness. Condoms
are instantly reversible as birth control; they prevent the potential spread of
sexually-transmissible infections; and they are mutually consensual. Users of
condoms are aware that no conception has taken place. In human rights, a man
and a woman may marry and bring forth a family. It is a civil right in the U.S.
but not a human right (as far as I know) to raise a child singly without the
knowledge of the other parent, the father in natural circumstances or either parent
in clinical circumstances. I see Ruth Bader Ginsburg's photo floating the
Internet. One wonders if she is actually agreeing to be represented in venues
such as Salon or if her photo is merely in use as a symbol of "women's
right to choose." Women's right to choose is rather bogus. Choice, as I
think of it, has turned out to be suitable as the brand name of a dog food.
Women disallowed to have children may be more like pets. Roe v. Wade means that
the doctor decides and it seems unrelated to abortion's legality; it has been a
form of gag order for women, who it is presumed have zero interest in bringing
forth children. To me, belonging is a better basis for understanding how a
natural family comes about: Two people meet and feel belonging, and a child
takes place. Under the Affordable Care Act, must companies finance child birth, that is very
expensive and may involve surgery and hospital stays? Is contraception merely a
cheap way out of comprehensive reproductive health care? Is it truly the case
that women are disinterested in becoming mothers? Is it truly the case that
employers welcome women employees' opportunity to have children? Should the
costs of child birth only be attached to the mother's health insurance policy
with her employer? Please submit your ideas.

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Hi, Carolyn Holbrook. I guess you just poked me. Thanks. Sorry for being so lame. There is no excuse for it. I limp because it's comfortable to limp. My ex-cat, Francis, started to limp one day. I brought him in. He liked Doctor Jim, notable since as a smart man cat, he avoided men, except two, not other people's favorites, and dogs. At the vet, Fran leaped from the table without sign of a limp. Dr. Jim said that if Fran was still limping by Friday, he'd test him for diabetes. I told that to Franny at home, who had returned to limping in the hall, apparently for effect. Then, following a separate warning, since he wouldn't let me brush him fully, Fran removed the mat he had let form near his anus and deposited it at the door of my and my dad's former office. It might have made me look bad at the vet that he had grown, that I had let him grow what I had termed rasta balls. I saved the mat after Fran expertly removed it with his teeth, that my sister, visiting, verified was gross to hear described when I showed it to her. In the end, Franny lasted outside each day almost sixteen years without bodily injury. He hunted. He left the house in the morning in Minnetonka as if he were a fire fighter and returned at noon to eat cat food, even after slaying and eating half a junior rabbit. He never gave up cat food or his dish of water in the kitchen. Lizards in Texas, beheadings, bitter tasting, probably, so he didn't swallow them. He walked -- then and then -- the edge of the property as if he had read the deed. He was a Himalayan/tabby mix from upstate New York, gray long hair. Here is the point of my correspondence: I have enjoyed three paid teaching days in Minnesota, since my return in 1996. All three paid days were fielded through S.A.S.E., all three at Patrick Henry. I loved it there. I hope never to become certified to teach. I'd go in again, especially to Saturday morning detention. The kids were so responsive to my creative writing lesson that morning. Did the proctor tell you, as she told me, the kids had never liked a lesson as much as they had liked that lesson. Please get me a job! Is there a way? I'd hoped to be in St. Paul tonight for Mankwe's performance. Stan Kusunoki invited me. I lost time today, so I feel welfare-lost in outer space again. It's $1.33/hour for a 24-hour day that covers medical co-pays and insurance only. The last therapist, a nice one at JFCS, said I'd be unable to hold a job. I have signed up for a job fitness test in Minneapolis in August. Minnesota Workforce Center offers the test but has been otherwise uncivil. -- If you go this evening, please give everyone my regards. ~AMB

Monday, May 26, 2014

That's it. The rest is history. And history is never as interesting as what your imagination can give you. History is what you get when the projector gets stuck.

It turns out that art, like everything else, is what some people do for a living. Art, what passes for it, is a commodity. It is just one more thing to pay for, lug home with you, borrow, or steal—hurtar para dar por Dios, as it says in the dictionary.

If I could rouse any interest, I would start a support group for people committed to art. I would circulate a petition, start an internal movement to bust people out of the art hospital. I would get a witness to say that I were healthy enough to live on my own, to make a decent living. What is stopping me is thinking that I am bound to the commitment I made to art as a child.

One way to make something real is in solitary confinement. Some people walk with God and honor their commitments. Those people may live anywhere on Earth except in the limelight.

Lock-up, I queried. Where is lock-up?

I would not have asked where lock-up is had I known it would seem forensic. The first thing you find out in lock-up is that God exists. In other situations you could just dismiss this information. In lock-up that is impossible. The second thing you find out is that God is everywhere, even in you. Your job as an artist is to come up with a reasonable gift to present to God.

Most people who go into the art hospital never get out. They just get moved to more comfortable quarters. Some of them, the invalids and life-long convalescents, live on the deluxe wing. The worst thing is knowing that deep down I want to stay. I would show no sign of resistance if they offered me a room with a view. "Put the trophies over there," I would tell my students from my comfortable bed.

For about one month out of solitary I would have appreciators. There would be no question about it—I had served both God and man. After that, if I managed to do anything more, they would give me students. It is very strange, these students. They come from miles around to be put in the hospital with you. Most of them are starving and craven. Usually it is because they had a parent or step-parent who belonged in one hospital or another themselves but who managed to hold on by sheer will power to the world outside. Then values changed, and these offspring lost the wherewithal to define their own existence. There are millions and millions of them, and their numbers are growing. There will never be enough beds.

The easiest wholesale solution is for everyone to drink their gift to death. That way is the most popular, but it is not the only possibility.

If people were willing to open their minds a bit, they could find constructive uses for creative energy. They could leave the hospital, even for day trips, and no one would blame them for changing their minds. They could write to their congressmen. They could volunteer at shelters for the homeless; better yet, they could go on the road with Jimmy Carter and build habitats for humanity. They could sing in the church choir. They could grow a garden. They could raise their own children. We do not need as much art as we are making. There are many other things we need more.

Some people, women especially, go the sex route. They devote their ingenuity to making themselves as sexy as movie stars. Artists can never be worshipped as mindlessly as movie stars, but some of them come pretty close. Other artists, the men especially, sleep around or mulch up their brains on fame.

The very lucky few get shipped back to solitary confinement. Most of these do not know they are lucky, chosen. They think they are being punished for bad reviews. They think bad reviews cheat. They think good reviews tell the truth.

There is no need to worry about art. Art in its ideal forms stays safe. Real art resists being the object of attention. It directs your gaze, and it swings in you forever.

Of the inmates with windows, every year, one or two of them, the purest at heart, beg to be let back into the cell. They are afraid they might jump. That would be going beyond the call of duty, something no one might say. They say that they have learned their lesson, and they promise all the real powers-that-be that they will work harder this time. They sign statements to that effect and they apologize to their loved ones for the emotional and financial turmoil they have caused and will continue to cause until death. (In some of them, the very exemplary, this bad behavior will be held up as customary, even as tax-exempt.) They say goodbye to them and vow never to look outside themselves for companionship or diversion again. Of course, it does not last. Pretty soon someone or something better comes along.

They all have one thing in common. They discovered their gift in the first place because they needed a friend, so they made one up. They kept on making things up until they had a world. Now that they have real friends, and sex, you would think they could just let it rest, but they can’t. They still have something to prove, so they put their name on the waiting list to perform their very own, original talent shows in the seasick cafeteria.

Most of the shows are the same, except in detail. It is rare indeed when someone gets the wind whipping through your grapevine. These days most anything is acceptable as an offering—a stick of wood, a drum roll, a shitty conversation ya had with a friend. The ones who feel ashamed of their limitations almost quit.

It was better in the days before promotion, when having a gift meant something in Latin. In God, a token to His allness in your smallness. A simple nest egg.

Of those, nos. 3, 15, 26, 35, 44, and 50 wanted to marry me. I wanted to marry 3, 7, 15, 35, 44, and 50. I should have asked 45 to marry me as my first proposal. I intend to copy down these numbers and use them for lotto. 45 and 35 got married later and divorced. 15 and the sculptor, I think, never got married. No. 9, the actor, and the foreman got and stayed married. 26, a novelist, told me much later, "If someone hasn't been married by 38, something is wrong with them." What was wrong with us -- no. 15 and me? We might have made a good, tall couple. What numbers go I?

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Chibard dibu Niborth, the reason I love my homeland is cold weather. Thanks to Tiboniby's largesse, which toward me has been modest, the equivalent of $5 per hour as compared to Libindiba Feibeydiber-now-Sibullibiviban's base pay of $114 per calendar hour of that marriage, not counting her expenditures and property, and to Ibolgibae Kaybimibashnibikiboviba's (Gibolibodibets's) pay by Tiboniby of $1.3888 per breathing second of her pleasing and complete in-person company, her modest presence, even as she watches news on Russian-language cable TV at Tiboniby's apartment, and thanks to my ability to create plenty in a conscious yet frugal environment of equality, that to me is measure itself—es ist mir egal—I have established myself as a renter near Minneapolis. I lived too long and now must owe myself. Hispanic real estate brokers in Manhattan all refused to let me rent an apartment near Tiboniby. Ibolgibae Kiba and Kibathribine Cibi Diba Mibatribe already had apartments due to their Russian mob aliases. I had no famous lover. I feared famous people. As was wise, but due to no counsel, I had kept an avoidance of wealthy people but not of professionals. My favorite wealthy person, after I consented to let Tiboniby near me eleven years ago to ask my hand in marriage was not Tiboniby Sibandibers himself but Jiboe Fibox. Who is your favorite woman poet, or, to put it a different way, what is your favorite poem by a woman? My favorite poet is H.D. A close and important American cousin of H.D.'s is Emily Dickinson. I used to sleep in a urine-soaked bed with Tiboniby. I loved Tiboniby more than I had loved even my grandmother Hazel whose den became home for my grandfather's speculative talk about the societal and familial subject alcoholism. John Berryman in his novel Recovery called Hazelden Howarden. My mother tells me, and I take her word for it, that Howards End is boring to read. My mother kept it in her car in case she had to wait. My mother graduated Phi Beta Kappa, U.W.-Madison, 1952. Sibam Chibauncibey said in his speech in the library at the Yale Club where I first met him that Wisconsin is one of the five great American universities, ahead even of Princeton. I supposed reluctantly that Princeton is soft as Macalester College is soft. A person could die just for having attended U.W.-Madison or Yale. Tiboniby denied knowing Manhattan kids Jibohn Wibendiber or Mibichibael Wibagniber or his childhood neighbor, Libisiba Fibox (not her maiden name). “What you have in common with these women,” Tiboniby said: “You and” Ibolgibae Kaybimibashnibikiboviba, Tiboniby's escort from Siberia married to two men concurrently, and one other of his 125 escorts since his marriage to Ibel Ibef Ibes rocked in 2001 and ended in 2003 when he got ill once, so that Ibel, of Mexican-American descent from California, could experience wealth independently, Kibathribine Cibi Diba Mibatribe, of Sydney, Australia, “... are smart.” As we lay together last, he spoke of his love for the 125 women, and my uterus prolapsed.